March 2005 Archives

I take it all back. It's not a nice day. It's a beeeutiful day. One of those really neat days full of sun and wind and clouds and ... well, drama. I felt like I was about to be engulfed by a sunny tornado, it was so windy outside. There were rainbows, and shafts of light (as seen in Dürer woodcuts) and swiftly moving shadows along the ground. And it wasn't cold. That's the big one. Usually my very Canadian memories of this kind of weather also have an aspect of bone-chilling cold. This was conspicuously absent today, and I'm all the more thrilled by it.

I'll be up in Toronto tomorrow, grabbing some servers from a customer (you know ... the customer), so my day will be a bit of a waste. But maybe I'll be able to make a short stop at Cheap Thrills to get some new tires/rims/whatever. I've heard you can get a bit of a deal from them on end-of-line rims, and mine are looking a little 90's, if you know what I mean. Also, I need to put these damn winter tires away for the season... The front tread is really wearing away, and if I run these another season, they'll be no good as winter tires. So, replacement tires first, rims second.

Nice day today. It's cloudy out, and it looks like rain is imminent this morning. But it's nice and warmish. And the snow's melting. All in all, a nice day today. Also, it's payday.

Tall Americano this morning at 1842. Love the drink, hate the country (har). Actually, the country's fine. Just a little scary these days. It's gotten so I'd have an easier time going to Cuba for vacation than St. Pete's in Florida. Now that's pretty weird, no? When it gets so that I have a harder time getting into the U.S. than Cubans have getting *out* of Cuba ... well, then I'll stay home.

Got my review (finally) at werk yesterday. It was positive. Very positive. Perhaps this means I'll get a raise or something, but I'll wait and see. It *does* mean I'm eligible for some training, so I'm picking an advanced UNIX course, or a basic development course -- something like that. Maybe a management course, so I can move into something a little higher up. I love telling people what to do.

Concerned with mostly domestic chores when I'm not at werk these days, sort of a Spring Cleaning thing. There's mountains of laundry to be done (does fabric softener go bad?) and a never ending sea of dishes flooding around me. I'd really like to get one of those dishwasher things I've been hearing about. Probably isn't going to happen until I get the kitchen redone, and the kitchen's not very high on the list, what with the prohibitive cost associated with getting new cupboards and countertops. On the up side, my fridge is no longer the property of Sears.

The pond is mostly thawed out. In another week or so, we might get it cleaned out and throw those goldfish back into it. R's threatening to leave them in there next winter, since they devoured most of her fish and aquatic plants while we kept them indoors. We were pretty sure the Beta fish was eaten as well, but we found him in a really tight spot, somewhere near the back corner of the tank. All his hiding spots are gone now, and he's had to fend off the goldfish since then.

Still, it's a nice day out. Sunny or no. The only time I'll care about sun or rain is if I'm not spending the entire day in an office.

My Blackberry finally gave up the ghost. I'll probably be getting a new one this week, unless I can convince werk to pay for 1X to my cell phone. The pager ended up getting little wet while doing laundry (that's the official explanation), and now it still works, but only to the extent that it says "battery inserted incorrectly" on its screen. The funny thing is that it does this even without a battery inserted. I took it apart, and sure enough, there's a 1 inch lithium-ion battery inside. Well, it doesn't matter too much, since we were going to grandfather these anyway. Now I've got an excuse to speed up the replacement process.

Still, it's been really good this weekend. I only had to go into work on Friday for a couple of hours, and I only got called 4 times yesterday. I know it sounds like a lot, but that's actually a little quieter than a normal weekend for me.

Well, it really looks like Spring is here. I stood in my driveway and, for the first time in a couple of months, didn't feel claustriphobic from the large mountain of snow which obscures the garage. That mountain is gone now (although much of it flooded *into* the garage) and I finally felt it was time to get ready for the rest of Spring. I want to get at the garage and begin its conversion into a viable art studio. The first part will likely be to prevent water from flooding in during the winter. As soon as I discovered this, I had to move all my paintings to higher ground, and make sure nothing was on the floor that might rot or get wrecked by water damage. Luckily, the "flooding" was limited to a slight trickle which froze quickly.

I'm going to have to raise/level the floor, or at least but a lip at the front of the garage. I also need to replace the existing door(s) and probably fix up the window. Later, I'd like to finish the ceiling, finish the walls, insulate it, and probably put in a skylight. If I'm really feeling ambitious, I might want to run electrical outlets around it, put in a sink, and perhaps a separate closet for gardening tools. A cheaper alternative to the gardening closet might be a separate shed for that equipment. There's a lot of room in the back yard -- it's quite deceptive.

Anyway, Spring... Cool. Glad it's finally here. And even before the end of March.

Been a busy weekend. Did some drinking and socializing every night so far -- in some cases, we were even double-booked, since everything's been on such short notice. Such short notice, that on Thursday, we still didn't have anything planned. I'm glad I was able to book Monday off. I really need this extra day off from work -- just to recover from all the days off work.

To top it all off, I've had a hard time focusing on just one thing at a time. I wanted to clean out the garage, clean out my car, get some painting done, and get that new batch of hot sauce made. I really only got some painting done, but that's just fine by me. I'm not going to overdo it just to get a few extra things done on my day off.

Today, I'm going down to visit my parents, and pick up a load of bottles. They managed to bring back some 12oz BBQ bottles from Florida, so I can get that big batch done just in time for the barbeque weather. I'm thinking of shovelling the back porch just to get at the barbeque and try out the first outdoor cooking of the year.

L&R are here -- still sleeping. They came down at the last minute and we went to dinner at Classic Indian. This was the double-booking problem we had: We already had priors, so we gave them a place to sleep, and left them to visit friends here in KW, while we went off to Guelph to look for a non-existent blues club. We ended up spending a couple of pitchers at Van Gogh's Ear, then headed to the Manor house for some strippers. Again -- not my choice, but I was just the driver for the evening.

Ok ... so, just to help out on the whole Thanksgiving issue, check out this link to a York University paper: "A Canadian Original or a U.S. Copy? Forget the Pilgrims. Canada's Own Thanksgiving Tradition Shaped by Ontario's Protestant Clergy, Refined by Commercial, State Interests".

Gotta hand it to those Protestant clergymen: "They created Canadian Thanksgiving as an exclusively religious event that was white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, pro-British and often anti-American in nationalist intent."

As for the Civic Holiday, CleverMonkey contributed this info:

"'August Civic Holiday' was created/suggested by a judge in Ontario
(Judge Sheard) because he wanted another long weekend near the end of
the season to take off to his cottage.

I swear this is the truth. Met him myself. Dated the sister of his
daughter-in-law.

I'm sure there were other reasons, like this was the only summer month
in Ontario without a long weekend, so it was deemed reasonable to add
another one."

(sigh), I suppose I should also add in the Boxing Day info too, just so we're complete on this....

"Boxing Day is celebrated on December 26th. It is a statutory holiday in the federal jurisdiction and in Ontario. If it falls on a Saturday or a Sunday, the working day immediately preceding or following Boxing Day is considered a legal holiday."

I'm sitting in 1842, by the window facing Princess St., drinking a tall Americano in a white ceramic cup. The staff didn't give me much of a greeting this morning, but that's ok, since I'm just in the mood to sit quietly and type away at the Netbook.

OK, so the last thing I was expecting today was more snow. I promised, some time ago, that I wouldn't ever complain about the heat in summertime. That part of the bargain has been honoured. I just want to point that out, so we can get on with the summery weather again.

The week's been dragging on and it's finally Friday (er, Thursday). At least we have a day off tomorrow. I could really use a couple more days off, and I have no bones about someone's messiah dying so that I don't have to work. Maybe we could have the Leader rendered technically dead for a couple of minutes in order to get a holiday out of it... I'm sure Leader would jump at the chance to help me out on ths. Maybe we could get the beer industry to sponsor it. We could call it "Awesome Friday" or "Leaster" In the event that it doesn't work out, I've saved up a couple of in-lieu days, so I may take Monday off as well. Apparently Christ's rebirth wasn't important enough to give everyone a day off. Ah well.

I kind of like the nebulous Canadian holidays which we celebrate, but can't really explain the origins of. Like Boxing Day, or Thanksgiving, or "August Civic Holiday", for example. I bet most Canadians wouldn't be able to tell you why we celebrate Thanksgiving... I mean, sure, they'd tell you all about how we celebrate, and spout off all this crap about turkey and pilgrims and Indian corn, or whatever, but when you tell them that it's the Americans who actually got this thing started (and in a different month, to boot!) they get all flustered.

Been looking at the latest build of the Linux wireless gateway software from the folks at PublicIP. They've done some pretty cewl things with it since I last had a look, including allowing users from one zone access to other zones with the same username/password, as well as storing configurations on USB drives -- since the whole thing boots from CD, you can store individual customizations on a USB drive so that it picks them up on a reboot.

You can also control bandwidth for different kinds of users. That's the best part. I can open up my wireless network, but allow only certain ports, and I can filter content as well. Such is the price of free, anonymous internet around my house.

Now I just need them to build in support for the USR wifi card I've got sitting around... This way, I don't need a separate wireless router. Either that, or they should support Orinoco cards. If you get a chance, check them out at http://www.publicip.net/. I believe this project could be a great and free alternative to the pay network that's cropping up in Waterloo.

So, it's not quite Spring yet, unfortunately. My parents got back from Florida on Friday, and they were expecting the weather to be a little nicer than this. They had to come back to check on the house, before heading down to SF to vist my brother, and his new kid. I'm expecting some kind of shouting match to erupt -- like it always does. My brother seems to have learned a thing or two from me about controversy and how to use it like paint on a canvas. He's been recently outdoing me like crazy, and I want to remind him that it's not a competition. I'm sure my folks are about as progressive as they can get by now, so pushing them further is only going to have negative consequences at this point (read: writing one out of the will, or something equally weird and vengeful).

Drinking a tall Americano at 1842. It's none too crowded here. I got another big hello, and a comment about having "the smallest laptop in the world".

Garbage Day. Got to ditch all the crap I dug out of the basement this past week, including about 2 dozen CD cases from under the stairs. These were left over from you couldn't buy CD-Rs on spools, and had to get them in those bulky and breakable Jewel cases. There's still the aftermath of the Girls' Night Out at my place last night. R was hosting, so I made myself scarce. That, and I had a dentist appointment in Stratford, so I had dinner there and took my time getting home. Pretty dismal track record for St. Patrick's Day -- not one single beer. Just coffee and a serious teeth-cleaning. I plan on celebrating tonight, if possible. So happy belated St. Patrick's Day....

Looks like Otomo's "SteamBoy" is opening today. I wanted to go see it, but wanted to catch it in Japanese first. Reviews are mixed (currently 24 reviews on RottenTomatoes.com with a 62% rating), and I wouldn't be surprised if any of the reviews comment on the English dubbing. Seriously, I like Patrick Stewart a lot, but you should use him like a cook uses saffron -- he doesn't need to be in every anime film... I just recently got Naussica on the special edition DVD, and he's in it. Pretty soon, he and Frank Welker will be competing for top spot in cartoon appearances. Ah, I kid.

Discovered these large icicles hanging off my garage. I like to think they're a symptom of the end of winter. I actually tried to knock them down, but they're fastened to the vines that hang off the roof.

China's eye is responding well to the cat antibiotics. We've got to put topical cream on her eye, so she's none too happy about that.

This one's not very classy, but I did want to do something current while I planned a new (and more clever) poll for you guys.

The old poll results are in, and here are the top 3 listings:

Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition - 20%
GIMP Pocket Reference - 20%
Amazon Hacks - 18%

So I've cleverly photoshopped some O'Reilly covers as a reward.

Got woken up by a 6:30 page this morning. It was just an alert, but it pretty much kicked my out of my dream like a football player kicks a computer nerd. I was having the weirdest dream too -- James Cagney and Edward G Robinson were dressed up in gangster suits and we were all playing board games in someone's rec room. The weird dreams are the worst to wake up from ... but it's often a relief to get out of them. Anyway, R couldn't get back to sleep, so we got up about an hour before we needed to, and I had a little spare time before work.

So, I'm enjoying an 1842 double espresso and typing away at the little netbook pro from werk (the space bar seems to begoing on this unit). Just finished up a workout at Popeye's Gym and I'm still all warmed up from it. Plus they've got the heat on pretty high in here, so it's a might uncomfortable for me. Too bad it's still so bloody cold outside (the loud radio people from Popeye's say it's going down to -18 tonight). I was hoping that by mid-March, it would be a little warmer. Well, I was hoping I'd win the lottery too, but I suppose that's not going to happen either...

Got to do some fun stuff this weekend. We almost got out to Starlight on Friday -- we were almost out the door before we realized we could just keep drinking and hang out with C+J at their place instead. On Saturday we braved the mild, sunny weather in KW to go visit R+L in Toronto. By the time we got to Milton, there were white-out conditions, and maybe 4-5 accidents on the 401. Luckily, the snow tires, and R's cavalier attitude towards snow storms gave us the wherewithal needed to get there and home safely. We dined in a pool hall/private club which had good nachos, but lousy service.

Today I did some painting and cleaned out some of the old boxes in the computer room. Got rid of a few things I'd never need again, such as the box for the digital camera I lost on that canoe trip, and that copy of Daikatana -- still unopened. I found my old Quake 2 CD, so I played that for a little while. Hoping the weather's going to get nice soon, so I can start doing stuff outside.

The white cat had some crusties on her eye for the past couple of weeks. We cleaned her up and had a look at it. There was a small scratch on her lower eyelid, so we figured it was a battle scar from the black cat. Well the cut healed, but she got another one, and the crusties never really went away.

So R took her to the vet today (I thank her for taking the time on this one), and it looks like the white cat has a little conjunctivitis. Got some antibiotics to give her. I may also want to trim her claws in case she's been scratching at her own eye. I remember wanting to tear my eyes from their sockets the last time they got itchy -- although that was a result of my cat allergy. Sort of a weird karma there.

Blogging from Cafe 1842 this morning. I thought I'd get out of the house a little early, and since I was blocking R's car, I had to get all dressed up in my winter coat anyway.

It's really sunny out right now -- it's absolutely beautiful. Oh, I could go on about the damnably cold weather, but I won't -- it's just that nice out: no wind, no clouds, and sunny. Sunny like it would be if it were dead summer.

It's actually pretty sparse and quiet here this morning. Somewhere on the radio, someone's playing an all-harmonica version of the theme from "Rockford Files". There's a couple of business people sitting quietly, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. One or two older folks sitting talking, as if trapped in a phone booth-sized Tim Hortons. Yeah, pick any "Timmies" around town and it would be stuffed with people, all still wearing their coats, and drinking take-out coffees, as if they were in a hurry to be somewhere, which they are not.

Thinking of doing something fun this weekend, like a road trip, or something that takes me away from town, even for a short time. I'd like to get back to Elora again, and check out the falls before it gets too warm. Maybe take my camera this time. Or, I could get up to Toronto and check out that buddhist place again. Great food there -- on the corner of Logan and Gerrard St.

Apparently we were doing some corporate pictures for the new company website, and while I was doing the product training, they did the first batch of them. Got a professional photographer in here with a mottled grey backdrop and everything. Since I didn't get a session back then, it was my turn today, and had to "make sexy" at a camera for a good 10 minutes. I will admit that this photographer had a great attitude, and I had a great time while it was going on. This guy was a pro, and he really put me at ease. Normally I don't like getting my picture taken (that's probably a lie, given all the pictures of me on this website, but ....).

For a change of pace, I removed the Beta Big Band piece off my phone, and replaced the ring tone with the Muppet Show theme. This was kind of a nod to the Leader, who had a monophonic ring on his Nokia some time ago. Man, every time that thing went off, I laughed. Now, every time my phone rings, I get giggles from everyone around me. OK, it's not the desired effect -- to be ridiculed for a ring tone on my cell. To be honest, I'm not sure what the desired effect was... but I still think it's pretty funny, so I'll leave it on there for a little while longer. I'll silence the phone while I'm in meetings or on conference calls (cause nothing screams professionalism more than the Muppet Show theme).

Talked with my dad today about my brother's new kid. Sounds like he actually is a little disappointed with the whole name thing -- although R reminded me that he could be a little tired of listening to my mom go on about it. That sounds more like him, but at the time, he seemed really, genuinely, upset at the prospect of the last name being hyphenated for the child. I have no idea why people have problems with the whole Zachary Aidan Foo-Bar name is a bad one, or why it's preferable to Zachary Aidan Bar-Foo. Certainly the difficulty stems from the husband and wife not having the same last names. But I think it's pretty fair to let the child decide what they want to do when they get on with their own life.

I, personally, like the idea of not naming a child until they are old enough to choose their own name. I'll agree that there are some clerical issues that may arise from this, such as not having a proper birth certificate information.